Asus Eee Box reviewed. Verdict: $300 wonder, but no HD video or gaming
Gadget Lab's Bryan Gardiner reviews Asus's Eee Box, a tiny desktop PC that arrives barely days after Dell's well-received Studio Hybrid. He reports that it's small, cheap and adorable—and powerful enough to the handle the basics.
At $300, it's far cheaper than any other mini desktop going, but offers most of the desirable features seen in more expensive models. It even has 802.11n and Bluetooth, which are optional upgrades on the $500 Dell. The downside is that it's useless for video streaming, has only 2GB of storage, and lacks an optical drive and HDMI output.
If it were 2006, this would be an incredible machine; even now, I'm not sure it isn't. At this point, however, tiny price and tiny size are not quite enough for me: it should have mass storage options and enough grunt to ouput a modern media collection.
The Dell offers just that, in its puniest configuration, but the temptation there is to throw in Blu-Ray and the WiFi upgrads, and suddently it's $1,000. Ah, the agony of choice! Time for a new Mac Mini, Apple.
Asus's Mini Invasion Continues with the Pint-Sized Eee Box [Wired: Gadget Lab]
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Anyone have pics of what the inside of this thing looks like? How hard is it to open up and work on? At the $300 price point, this poses serious competition for the pre-existing Network Attached Storage (NAS) market such as the KuroBox Pro ($170, w/o 3.5" SATA hard drive). There's a whole community of people using the KuroBox as tiny servers (filling the niche the late Cobalt Qube left vacant). Many in that community were keenly interested in adding a video card to its PCI-e 1x slot; now here's the Asus Eee Box with DVI built-in and far fewer hacker quirks/limitations to get up and running.
Update: Here's the Eee Box ripped apart.
Direct link to gallery.
Indeed it uses a 2.5" SATA laptop hard drive in an ejectable tray.
Sweet! I've been looking for a low-power system to use as a server.
It also looks like something a lot easier to work on than a Mac Mini, in case I want to up the RAM to 2GB or replace the hard drive. I replace that drive with something larger with a Linux distro, and I'm set.
I hope the BIOS allows me to boot off of a USB DVD or flash drive.
Thanks for the links, Zuzu!